Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Present Day
Burbank, California
Mission Day One
Jules’s very first case came in via Robin, which made total sense.
It was only natural that ripples would occur when Robin, with both his celebrity status and vast network of Hollywood connections, made even just casual comments about the opening of a Troubleshooters office in Los Angeles, run by his former-FBI husband with help from a close friend who’d been a Navy SEAL.
The irony was that they didn’t have a brick and mortar office yet.
They didn’t even have a permanent home—he and Robin were staying in a vacation rental in Sherman Oaks—close to and paid for by the studio where Robin’s latest guest-star gig, long on his schedule, was being filmed.
The place was very nicely appointed, for sure, with plenty of extra room for Sam to stay over, which was a bonus.
Robin had wanted to cancel the job, and would have, if Jules hadn’t agreed to fly out here to California with him.
Oh, how the tides had turned.
But Robin had never been more deadly serious about refusing to leave Jules home alone.
And since Jules knew that Robin had been looking forward to playing this particular role—the villain in a several-week-long storyline on a popular TV show—getting the hell out of Boston seemed like a very good idea.
So less than forty-eight hours ago, he’d joined Robin on his first-class flight westward-ho and therefore had been in the perfect geographical place to accept his very first client—one Milt Devonshire Junior—when the man had gotten in touch via Robin’s agent, of all people.
The situation wasn’t anywhere close to life-and-death. It was a simple locate the whereabouts. But maybe it was good that Jules was starting small, like this.
Maybe?
Definitely.
Milt D. the Junior was apparently wealthy and happy to pay a crap-load of money for Jules to leap into action, so leap he did.
And Sam leaped, too. The short-term plan was for a wide variety of Troubleshooters operatives to partner-up with Jules until he’d fully staffed the new LA office, and Sam was his first volunteer.
The former SEAL had barely gotten back to his home in San Diego when this job crossed their wire, so this morning he’d caught a commuter flight to Burbank, which was the only time air travel from San Diego to the Los Angeles area made sense.
Flying into LAX was insane. But BUR was just a few minutes from both the rental house and this morning’s meeting location.
The tiny Burbank airport was a throwback to Old Hollywood, and Sam was waiting on the sidewalk in the morning sunshine as Jules pulled up.
Sam had on a button-down shirt with his jeans. Sleeves rolled up and what looked like a sports jacket casually draped over one shoulder. And yeah, in an airport where movie stars constantly came and went, he still managed to stand out.
“Hey, so I guess we’re doing this. It’s gonna be fun.
” He smiled now at Jules as he tossed his luggage and his jacket into the back and climbed into Jules’s little rental car.
Robin had already pushed the passenger seat all the way back to accommodate his long legs, but Sam—eternally hopeful—reached down to the control handle beneath the seat, to see if he could squeeze out another inch or two.
Nope. Undaunted, he reclined the back of the seat a bit instead.
“Fun,” Jules repeated as he maneuvered his way back into the slow and steady stream of traffic headed away from arrivals and toward the airport exit.
“You okay?” Sam asked. “Because we really don’t have to do this today.”
Jules glanced at his friend. “You just jammed yourself into coach on a last minute flight to get up here for this, and now you want to blow it off? Aside from the incredible inconvenience for you, we’ll lose the job.”
“Fuck ’em. Because if you’re not ready..
.” He shrugged. “We can have lunch, then look at some office space. Or house hunt. Robin said you were gonna look for something close to Janey and Cosmo.” Robin’s sister and her family lived in this same part of LA, relatively close to the studios. “It’s not like there’s nothing to do.”
Jules nodded as he followed his GPS’s directions to the law office where they were scheduled to meet the client. “You want to help me house hunt.”
“Hey,” Sam said. “I’m excited about you moving out here—even if you’re not quite there yet. And like I said, if you’re not ready—”
“Fuck ’em. Check. But... I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready ready. So...”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I been there. In that case, we might as well dive on in.” He clapped his hands together which made quite the noise in the little car.
“All righty then, there’s shit I need to know.
And before you get disgruntled, yes I do read my email regularly, you know I do, but alas, I did not read your email from yesterday in my scramble to do everything that needed to be done before I left this morning.
And when I got on the extremely ancient commuter plane—nary a charging outlet in sight—my phone battery was down to two percent, which I saved to text you that I’d landed. ”
“Not a problem.” Jules had worked with many a boss who’d preferred verbal overviews to written reports.
He was good at making exposition both clear and concise.
“There’s not a lot to tell. The client’s name is Milt Devonshire Junior.
Thirty-two years old,” he reported even as he held up the phone charger cord that was already plugged into the car’s USB port and Sam plugged in his phone.
“Only known child of Milton Devonshire Senior. I know very little about either of them—I’ve had absolutely no time to do any digging on my own.
I requested a thorough background search from the Troubleshooters San Diego office, got a thumbs-up-hold-tight response but crickets are still chirping.
How long does it normally take to get that kind of report? ”
“Hmm, yeah, it can take a while,” Sam said. “Lys is looking to hire more support. Currently, this particular case is kinda low priority...”
“So... not hours, then. A day or two...?”
Sam made a maybe face.
“More than two days? Jesus, really? How the hell are we supposed to...” Jules stopped himself and took a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m just used to being handed a file and...” He exhaled hard. Those days were over.
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Pain in the ass, but you’ll get used to the time delay—which will be shorter when we have an actual LA office with dedicated support.
We’ll get the info we need, just not before this meeting.
I’m sure it’ll all be straightforward.” He gently got Jules back on track.
“So we’re meeting Junior... at his lawyer’s office? ”
“I think it’s his lawyer. Guy named Ernest Harper, has a practice right here in Burbank.
Although it’s possible Harper’s the executor of the client’s father’s estate, we’ll find out for sure when we get there.
Anyway the father—Milton Devonshire Senior—was a bigtime movie and TV producer from the 80s and 90s.
He recently died and from what I could tell from my phone call with Milt the Junior, he left most of his twenty million dollars or so to a woman that neither the still-living Milt nor the lawyer knows. ”
“And Still-Living Milt is paying us to find her.” Sam sat with that.
They were getting close to the lawyer’s office building—it wasn’t that far from the airport. Jules slowed down a bit to read the street numbers. “The distribution of the estate is obviously on hold until she’s found,” he said. “He wanted to get us started looking for her ASAP.”
“Does she have a name?” Sam asked.
“Emily Johnson.”
Sam laughed. “Damn.”
Jules smiled. “Yeah. A challenge, but... not impossible,” he said.
“Milt the Junior already got his father’s accountant to send us payroll files and tax info—that came in this morning.
Everything’s digital, so I did a quick global search through the payroll files for Johnson, but came up blank.
I didn’t have time to take more than a quick look—but I did get the names of Devonshire’s staff over the past few years.
Mostly housekeepers—there were four different women, one long-term starting way back who must’ve retired, and then three in the past few years.
Kind of a revolving door, but they’re all first on my talk-to list.”
Sam shook his head. “I’m still a little stuck on Milt the Junior proactively working to give away his inheritance. Unless he knows there’s nothing in those files that’ll help us find her.” He laughed his disbelief. “Emily fucking Johnson. Does she at least have a middle name?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Jules said. “But I’d guess it’s not that.” Despite Sam’s pessimism, he was still hopeful that solving this case could be as simple as talking to one of the housekeepers—who probably knew every single person who’d ever crossed the threshold of Devonshire’s front door.
Another piece of useful info would be the producer’s social calendars and address books going back in time as far as possible.
There should be a wealth of information—decades of it in hard copies, considering the man’s age, in file cabinets and desk drawers—in the old’s man home office.
“Another priority is to get a key to Devonshire Place.”
“Yeesh. He really named his house after himself?”
“Welcome to Hollywood,” Jules said. “You still having fun?”
Sam laughed. “You know it.”
This was, in many ways, a pretty fun case. Find this woman, verify her connection to recently deceased film producer Milton Devonshire, and then tell her, Guess what? You just inherited a ginormous amount of money!
With luck, she would not be a Nazi, although that was never guaranteed. Welcome to modern America, where Nazis now roamed free.